VentureBeat

Intuit completes buyout of Mint.com – Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer will suck it up and shift from CEO to vice president and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group, which also includes Quicken products.

Yes, Disney’s new film is a hand-drawn musical – “I’ve never understood why the studios were saying people don’t want to see hand-drawn animation. What people don’t want to watch is a bad movie,” Pixar co-founder John Lasseter told the Wall Street Journal. He’s got high hopes, high-apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes for Disney’s new hand-animated feature, The Princess and the Frog:

Production costs for films animated by hand or by computer tend to be comparable. The decision to use nearly photorealistic computer imagery, instead of the more impressionistic traditional technique, is mostly a matter of aesthetic calculations. Executives involved in making “Princess” say it cost slightly less than its original budget, which they declined to disclose. Others in the industry estimated the film’s cost at around $150 million, a bit less than last year’s “Monsters vs. Aliens,” by DreamWorks Animation.

The retro production technique isn’t the only hurdle facing “Princess.” The movie’s classic musical form, in which characters break into song, Broadway-style, could feel dated to audiences more accustomed to wisecracking movies like “Monsters.”

Droid’s multitasking puts it ahead of iPhone in reviews –The Journal’s Digits blog has rounded up the reviews. If you’re looking to be able to name one thing the Droid can do that the iPhone can’t, the answer is multitasking — running multiple apps at the same time, which PCs and Macs have done since the 1980s.

Apple claims it doesn’t allow apps to run in the background because it doesn’t want customers unclear on background apps to wonder why their iPhones are running out of battery juice. Android’s emerging culture is of the opinion that things like background applications and battery life should be in the hands of developers and users.

Apple may or may not be building a tablet, but it’s definitely shopping a $30-per-month TV service — Peter Kafka, our reliable gossip source at MediaMemo, says Apple has been pitching TV networks in recent weeks, “trying to round up support for a monthly subscription service. The service wouldn’t be tied to the company’s iffy Apple TV hardware. It would be delivered through iTunes.

If nothing else, Apple has generated another round of over-the-top blog posts. Best paragraph so far is by PC World’s Jeff Bertolucci:

It’s going to happen, the only question is when. The cable TV industry’s monopolistic, anti-consumer practice of offering bloated, overpricedprogramming packages is coming mercifully to an end, brought down by a slew of more affordable options made possible by broadband Internet.

Sprint Netbook isn’t a money saver, says veteran PC World writer — David Coursey, who has a reputation for being opinionated but factual, lists the hidden costs of Sprint’s $199.99 netbook. The biggest bump is the $100 mail-in rebate. Before that check arrives, the upfront cost of Sprint’s Dell Inspiron Mini 10 is the same $299 for which Dell sells the Mini 10 online. Rebate checks in general have a habit of not showing up, as many consumers now know. Did you get your Android rebate yet? Let me know.

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